is it possible to change a complete artist name? One example: the artist is named "VNV Nation", not "Vnv Nation". It's a minor fault, I know... but it's wrong. And a lot of songs are linked with the wrong name. Can you change the name (delete the old one) and all sites that are linked with it!?
I hope you know what I mean. ;-)
--Turok 02:52, 21 September 2006 (PDT)

I am not Sean, but batch moves can be done, the request list is over at Category:Requests For Moves. However, many of these have been sitting here since July.

To Sean: this will need to be handled soon as the list is getting rather long.

Cool, I'll get on that soon. I think there's a half-written sscript for that somewhere (if I put all of the half-written things together that I have for LyricWiki, I think I'd have 3 or 4 more finished things ;) Anywho, thanx for the heads-up.

Hi!
I noticed you're adding some lyrics using an RTL language (looks like Hebrew?)...
Anyway, I've seen this used before in wikis, do you happen to know how to set up RTL in MediaWiki? If you know how, I'd be more than happy to get that working on here. If not, don't worry... we'll figure it out eventually
Thanks,
-Sean Colombo 17:07, 1 October 2006 (PDT)

Hello there :)

I read about you on dreamhost newsletter. You can use <div dir=rtl> at the beginning and </div> at the end. You can use it same as you use <lyrics> tag. Perhaps <lyrics:rtl> is good choice.
P.S. Yeah, it's hebrew!
--CONFIQ 17:30, 1 October 2006 (PDT)

I really like this site. I want to use the web-service APIs from a Flash application to get song lyrics, but there is just one gotcha currently. The part-name in the response is "return" which is a reserved word in Flash, which means my application will not compile properly with the IDE I am using. Any chance of providing an alternate method, or perhaps an alias?

Regards,
Jim

Hi Jim,

Sure thing. I just added the getSongResult() alias which is the same as getSong() except that the return value is called 'songResult' instead of 'return'.

Let me know how it goes, :)

- Sean

Sean,

Thanks, that certainly helped!! Now a properly formatted crossdomain.xml [1] file is required for flash objects to be permitted to make a SOAP request to a domain other than the one that served the Flash SWF file. Can you add this for the every growing Flash developer/user community? Refer to the above link for more details.

Once my application is complete, I will write back to post the URL for others to enjoy.

Regards,
Jim

PS. For your convenience, I included the proper crossdomain.xml file contents as stated in the reference link.

I set the file up in the root directory (which appears from the documentation to be the right place). Let me know if you have any other issues. Thanks for supplying the code and the link... it made things a lot faster for me! :)

- Sean

Sean,

It looks like we are close to nailing this one. I would say that during my non-scientific test, I get a failure about 30% the time, and I also get a lot of "Not Found" results too. The failues could be due to the high volume of traffic that lyricwiki.org has been experience as pointed out in an unrelated post. However, I think the not founds are often because of a minor mismatch and/or a special character in the song name. For example, "The Eagles Desperado". Dropping the leading article ("the") works fine, but I am not sure if this simple rule will yield the overall best results. Another thing that seems to cause not found is when the song title contains special characters, such as "(Live)", etc. Any ideas?

Finally, I am curious to know how others are formatting the lyrics as it appears to be a continuous string of text in the response.

I am excited to be getting very close to launching my free music service, and you will hear about it on LyricWiki.org first!!!!

Thanks again, and keep up the good work.

Regards,
Jim

Hi. There were a couple of things, I'll try to get to them one at a time

You're right, the failures are just because this server can't handle the traffic. We're trying to figure out a solution because this current state of affairs is unacceptable.

To fix that "Not Found" issue for different spellings of the name ("The" or no "The", having ", The" at the end, acronyms, etc.) will require some more code on my side. If you just start using the sytem, I'll be hammering that out in the SOAP at some point (feel free to bug me occassionaly if I don't get to it) and it will just start working.

The lyrics are generally formatted with the line breaks encoded as the "\n" character which is standard. If you're outputting it into some kind of HTML frame (I know very little about flash), then you'd need to replace each "\n" with "<br/>". If you're finding that even "\n" isn't showing up, please give me an example artist/songName so I can check it out, thanks :).

The idea of a lyrics wiki is great. What's even greater is having lyrics served through a web service. I'm interested in building a small Flash app (for personal use) for quickly grabbing lyrics when I need it. There is a problem with the crossdomain.xml file: it's redirected to http://www.lyricwiki.org/Crossdomain.xml (the "wikified" version) which is not good (it isn't what Flash Player expects, so it rejects the file). Also, since I'm here, when it comes to flash, it's generally a good idea to keep your crossdomain file (and therefore the webservices) to a separate domain. I'm not an expert in the area, but the main idea is to prevent cross site scripting.

Regards,
Robert

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the heads-up on the crossdomain file. I fixed that now [2]. I'm not really sure there are any xss vulnerabilities we need to be worried about atm, but I'll keep that in mind, thank you!

It looks like we are having very high site traffic right now, to the point that the server cannot handle it very well. The best that I can tell is that we are currently at the top of the list for lyrics sites over at sumble upon. Just thought I would let you know.
- Teknomunk 11:51, 28 October 2006 (PDT)

Yikes, that's such a shame that a bunch of these hits keep going to waste when the server can't handle them (people getting 404's and a ton of 500's). I'm planning on moving to a new server soon at HostGator (they offered us free hosting if we slap a little 'hosted by host gator' on the page). It has guaranteed uptime, so it should be able to handle the traffic a lot better.

As a follow-up... The new server we're on ended up not being a HostGator box. That was going to be shared, they were going to need 2 links to them on the page, and they never got back to me after our initial talks. Although that would have been free (although a link plus a little image-badge are a 'cost' in their own right), instead I just invested in a dedicated server from G3. It feels like I can breathe again! :D

I know that you started a nomination for Album Of The Week. I don't want to be pushy but I would like to get the new page moved over to Main Page, within the next two weeks. Really I would like to have had it up before the high traffic started as it would give a better impression for the site than what we have up now.
Also, I can update the album of the page template manually for the first few weeks, but eventually we will need an Uberbot script to update it automatically.
- Teknomunk 22:35, 1 November 2006 (PST)

I really love the songs from Les Mis. It seems, however, that they are scattered all over the place. I'd like to place them all under the author Miserables, Les (many of them are there already), which only the admins can do. Thanks a lot. 75.16.51.163 17:13, 1 November 2006 (PST)

Hiya. Linking to the songs from the Les Mis page seems like a fine idea. But since you don't need to actually move the pages (since our naming convention goes by the artist), you can just link to them in Les Mis's wikitext. All users are allowed to do that (I think all users are still allowed to do moves too.. just not mass-moves). Anywho... good luck :)

The new server is great. I feels like it is more responsive that it ever was at Dreamhost. However, There are still a few things that need to get fixed. The rss feed for the recent changes is not loading at all. If I run across any other problems, I'll let you know. Anyways, I am glad that the server is not creeping along anymore.
- teknomunk 19:43, 9 November 2006 (EST)

Hmm, I couldn't recreate the problem. I clicked that link and it loaded correctly. Maybe the DNS settings didn't propagate to your RSS feed-reader? Not sure what else could be going on. If it's still not working, lemme know. Thanks :)

The problem could not be DNS related unless the RSS feed is handled by a different server that the rest of the site.

I tried loading the page in everything I could think of and here are the results:

Curl downloads the feed correctly.

Firefox downloads the feed correctly.

Lynx tries to download a gziped version of the feed.

The feed cannot be fetched by Akregator.

In Konqueror it gives me this:

An error occurred while loading http://www.lyricwiki.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss:
Connection to host www.lyricwiki.org is broken.

In Konqueror using a Squid proxy gave me this:

An error occurred while loading
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.lyricwiki.org/index.php?
The following error was encountered:
Zero Sized Reply
Squid did not receive any data for this request.
Your cache administrator is webmaster.
Generated Fri, 10 Nov 2006 06:38:02 GMT by localhost.localdomain (squid/2.5.STABLE10)

Not sure what is going on. The feed worked fine on the old server. This is the only page I have come across that behaves this way. It's rather weird.

Just so you know, I have circumvented the problem on my side by proxying the rss feed through another web server, so I'm in no rush to have this fixed. The problem still exists on this server and as far as I can tell is the only page with this problem. The image directory is more urgent.

Yeah, you're right about the DNS (duh... I wasn't thinking). It might have something to do with running out of memory... that was whiting out pages earlier. I'll try bumping up the memory limit for that page. Thanks for mentioning the image thing... I hadn't gotten an alert from that change & the diff-to-penultimate didn't have it shown! (image uploading is fixed now though).